Those of you who have seen or read Trainspotting know that
England has problems with its borders. In one famous scene, the
drug-addled Renton looks across the ruined Scottish landscape and
shouts, "We're colonized by wankers!" This tension and the type of
fiction it produces are nothing new. Since the early work of Daniel
Defoe and Jane Austen, British fiction has been concerned with
boundaries and their disintegration–the boundaries between nations and
races, between the sexes, between the individual and an increasingly
alien environment. The focus of this course is the twentieth-century
struggle in British fiction between the rigidity of tradition and the
drive for cultural freedom. Be prepared, then, for a course in which
our vision is not limited to the drawingroom, but extends across class
and sexuality, throughout the colonies, and beyond the law. Of
course, we will look at true Brits, such as Woolf and Fowles, who can
help us to establish the changing national perspective, but we will
also focus on writers, such as Joyce and Rushdie, who seriously
question the terms "British," "nation," and "the novel." And so,
throughout, we will stir things up by examining notions of tradition
by way of those who fall outside of it and of difference by those who
embrace alternative traditions. We will also pay attention to lesser
known voices that have unconventional and sometimes confrontational
relations to "British" literature. Our goal will be to expand the
borders of this field, or at least prove them to be false, and to let
the likes of Renton have their say.

The course will proceed historically and consider four stages of
development. First, we will explore the relationship between the
collapse of Victorian culture and the move away from
nineteenth-century realism in Ford Maddox Ford's The Good
Soldier and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier. Next,
we will look at the innovations of the high modernists as they were
influenced by social revolution and the first world war, focusing on
Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway. Then, we will consider the post-war years and
discuss what one critic has labeled the "break-up of Britain,"
discussing the move toward the postmodern in John Fowles's The
French Lieutenant's Woman and Angela Carter's The Infernal
Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Finally, we will consider
recent post-colonial writings and the ways in which they have renewed
and expanded the definition of British fiction. We will read Salman
Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Irvine Welsh's
Trainspotting.